Chicago’s Industrial Decline: The Failure of Redevelopment, 1920–1975

Chicago’s Industrial Decline represents Robert Lewis’s third and final installment in his trilogy examining the historical geographies of industrial Chicago. His earlier work, Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis (2008), challenged conventional understandings of Chicago’s industrial landscape by demonstrating how manufacturing districts on the urban fringe were fundamental to the city’s development from its earliest days. Lewis continued this exploration in Calculating Property Relations: Chicago’s Wartime Industrial Mobilization, 1940–1950 (2016), which bridged the gap between growth and decline by examining how wartime production reconfigured the city’s industrial spaces and property relations. This new volume completes the narrative by examining deindustrialization and the failed public-private institutional attempts at revitalization. Throughout his work, Lewis maintains a metropolitan-scale analysis, consistently arguing that industrial decentralization wasn’t unique to the post–World War II era but dated back to the city’s early years. Lewis’s methodological strengths—particularly his spatial analysis and focus on property relations—remain consistent across all three works, and his research has reshaped our understanding of Chicago’s economic geography across its full industrial arc from growth through wartime transformation to ultimate decline.Chicago’s Industrial Decline provides an important intervention in deindustrialization and urban renewal histories of Chicago and the broader Manufacturing Belt. Rather than standard narratives of industrial decline that date deindustrialization to the 1970s, Lewis traces varying measures of absolute and relative decline to the interwar years, and he connects the city’s industrial decline to the suburbs’ industrialization. In doing so he provides a fine-grained and localized approach that challenges the argument that the rise of the Sunbelt caused the Rust Belt’s rusting. Uneven development occurred not just at the regional level but also within different parts of the same metropolitan region. While tracking macroeconomic shifts across time, Lewis makes clear that structural industrial decline was not an abstract force but emerged from shifting logics of property investment driven by the financial decisions of individuals. While industrial property in the city increasingly appeared blighted and unprofitable to investors, suburban greenfield sites became more attractive.In seven chapters spanning 1920 to 1975, Lewis organizes the book into three main sections. The first part of the book examines Chicago’s manufacturing losses from 1920 to 1970. While manufacturing jobs began to trickle out of the city after World War I, the pace surged following 1945. Exacerbating these industrial job losses over the fifty-year period following 1920 was investors’ decisions to redirect new capital investment for industrial plants from the city center to the suburbs. Since industrial firms are emplaced—fixed to real material property and networks of exchange—they are capital intensive and difficult to move, leading to a stubbornness of relinquishing “sunk costs.” Government assistance—particularly through public-private partnerships—was crucial to offsetting industrial capitalists’ climbing costs of place-dependency. However, it was not until after 1945 that business leaders became receptive to government intervention on property questions regarding the provision of quality industrial land.The second part of the book examines how discourses of blight defined the industrial crisis and shaped urban renewal programs. While most scholars have examined blight in the context of racialized understandings of urban housing markets, Lewis focuses on Chicago elites’ efforts to form public-private partnerships to renew the city’s “wastelands” through industrial renewal, leveraging local, state, and federal government resources and offering the promise of new tax revenue and jobs. Chicago political and business leaders sought to stem the loss of manufacturing plants and jobs in the city through a range of initiatives after the Housing Acts of 1949, 1954, and 1965 began to make federal funds available for nonresidential renewal.The third part of the book turns toward a detailed account of various postwar “institutional fixes” to urban industrial decline. One significant example is the Chicago Land Clearance Commission (CLCC), which Lewis identifies as likely the first agency in the United States to use federal funds for industrial renewal. The CLCC’s flagship West Central Industrial District located on the Near West Side around Roosevelt and Canal proved disappointing in net job growth and tax revenue in the over twelve years that it took to complete, demonstrating the challenges of property-based renewal strategies. Despite these limitations, Lewis argues, the CLCC established an innovative model for government involvement in managing and regulating industrial property.Similarly, the South Side Planning Board, a private nonprofit planning organization created in 1946, attempted to eradicate blight and revitalize nine square miles south of the Loop with ambitious industrial redevelopment plans. Even with backing from major institutional stakeholders like Michael Reese Hospital and the Illinois Institute of Technology, its vision for transforming blighted areas into modern industrial facilities failed to materialize, stymied by more powerful forces pushing for a postindustrial city model.Lewis also chronicles the contrasting fortunes of industrial parks inside and outside the city. While suburban developments like the Centex Industrial Park in Elk Grove Village (near O’Hare Airport) thrived in the late 1950s, city-based attempts like the Ashland Industrial Center in the former Stockyards struggled despite significant public-private investment. By the 1970s, the failure of property-focused renewal led Chicago to abandon these approaches in favor of tax abatements, industrial revenue bonds, job training programs, and other financial incentives.Throughout, Lewis argues that these institutional fixes never proved sufficient, as Chicago, like other cities in the Rust Belt, faced debilitating structural forces that required systemic changes beyond eliminating blight and reorganizing property relations. Industrial renewal failed, Lewis contends, because more attractive locational assets elsewhere (the suburbs, the South, and overseas), corporate strategies that sought increased market share and profits at the expense of places, the dominance of a growth coalition looking to create a postindustrial city on the ruins of the old industrial one, and limited local options to rejuvenate manufacturing led to continued and uneven disinvestment in the city’s industrial base. (18)Two areas for further exploration within Lewis’s framing of industrial renewal are how labor organizing and the city’s entrenched patterns of racial segregation informed this long history. Lewis makes an essential contribution to our understanding of urban industrial change, deindustrialization, and the limitations of public-private initiatives’ focus on property relations to stem uneven metropolitan development.